Blog vs. Main Site – SEO Myth Busting

Here’s a question we get asked pretty often, although it may be phrased in many ways. Does a blog have less SEO value than the main site? Some marketers believe that Google treats blog posts like news articles, and their lifecycle is therefore shortened.

Is there any truth to this? Absolutely not.

The blog is embedded on the site, so it doesn’t matter.

The reason the myth exists is because of the traditional structure of blog sites. Typically the home page of a blog consists of articles arranged chronologically, with the most recent one at the top.

New articles added to the blog appear at the top of its home page, pushing down the older ones. Eventually they end up on the second page and the cycle continues. The more content you publish, the further it goes down, moving onto page 3, 4, 5, and so on.

The problem is that there ends up being no entrance points into that article.

So as that page ages, and gets pushed further down away from the main page, it gets less access. Literally it takes more clicks to get to that blog post.

A post on the main page can be clicked immediately. But if it’s on the second page, it requires an extra click to get there. As a blog post gets pushed onto pages further away from the main page, it requires additional clicks to get there.

If you can avoid that, your pages won’t die over time. Here’s a few ways to make sure that doesn’t happen.

• Use archive pages. Most content management systems have this built into their platform, and it’s easy to activate.
• Create topically-related content hubs. This provides a way to access those important posts that might live on the blog.
• Use menus to provide direct access to blog posts that could otherwise be buried.
• Flatten your site architecture so that readers don’t have to clickthrough so many times to reach an article.

The purpose here is that you’re telling the story that these blog articles are as important as any other page on the site. What you don’t want is that, after a year, the articles you published at the beginning are now sitting on page 10.

That can tell the story that these blog articles aren’t as important as other pages on your site.

Think about how this looks to a search engine webcrawler. It comes to your main site’s homepage, goes to the blog, that’s two steps; then it reads page two, that’s three steps. And so it goes. As you’re further down the line, you’re telling the story that the page isn’t very important with your information architecture. Otherwise it wouldn’t be buried like it is.

So the myth comes from bad information architecture and bad internal linking. It doesn’t come from the fact that it’s a blog because that doesn’t make any sense.